


(With Heart)

by technicallymilkshakes



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Slice of Life, an umbrella - Freeform, and a little cabin tucked away in the woods, carpenter!Jongin, this work features:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 03:23:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17911064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/technicallymilkshakes/pseuds/technicallymilkshakes
Summary: You were always the one I was looking for.





	(With Heart)

           There was a city full of people all with the same face. That was the only thing you could remember from your dream. They moved like city people move and talked like city people talk, but no matter which direction they moved in, that face, multiplied by the hundreds, always followed you.

           A thin shudder worked its way up your back and you hunched your shoulders in. You would need to buy another sweater today.

           Although only a little over an hour from civilization proper, it felt as if nothing existed beyond this place. When you first arrived, the newspaper at the grocer’s was six days behind; now, two weeks later, it still laid there, the words made indistinct by a veil of dust.

           There was no local newspaper. Announcements were posted on the Town Hall bulletin board. The birth of a grandchild. A thirty-year anniversary. A party for the New Year. The announcements only went as far back as the beginning of the month. As if that was the origin of time. Another month would probably see those announcements vanished, a casualty to be remembered only with vague nostalgia for a time ill-recalled.

           But truthfully, even the bulletin board was redundant. As you pulled on your boots and tied up the laces, you thought,  _This is how the news travels around here_. It sticks to the bottom of shoe soles and if you looked closely enough, you could follow its traces in the shadowy exchange of speculative glances. A tree of a thousand branches originates from a single seed.

           You left the place you lived and walked down the road. It was raining now just as it had been raining for the last three days. The sky was bright even without the sun, and it looked as lovely and cold and distant as everything else around you.

           It took only ten minutes walking to get to the store front. A bell tinkled as you opened the front door and a woman facing the opposite direction sang out a name that wasn’t yours. When you didn’t answer, she turned around. The smile on her face morphed from happiness to embarrassment. You glanced away before she could murmur an apology.

           The store was larger than it looked from the outside. Clothes were arranged on racks and displays by season rather than by color or gender. You gravitated towards the sweaters and looked for one in a style you didn’t already have. There was just one and it was grey. You hesitated. Maybe it would be better to buy one in a style you already had but in a different color. But then a breath passed and you wondered what use there was in being scared of a color. You took you selection to the cash register.

           “Is there anything else I can help you with?” the woman from before asked as she pulled the sweater across the counter.

           You gazed coolly back at her and responded with a flat “No.”

           The muscles around her mouth worked to keep her lips in the curve of a smile. She examined the price tag and told you how much it would cost, her words a little more clipped than before. But still the smile. Why was it that people were so concerned with what other people thought of them?

           When she made to slip the sweater in a paper bag, you held out a hand to stop her.

           “It’s raining. Use a plastic bag.” You held your arm out so she could see the raindrops gathered on the fabric of your jacket.  

           There was no smile remaining as she pulled the sweater from the paper bag and slipped it into a plastic one. She thrust it towards you. Yet this woman who had called a stranger by a friend’s name still called out “Have a good day” as you left.

* * *

 

           A dry rasp pulled you from your abstractions as your boots mechanically sought every puddle. You looked up and found yourself by the side of a wooden house. You looked behind you, but there was no discernible trace of the trail you had been following.

           The rasp licked its way up your neck and into your ears. You grimaced and continued your way around the outside of the house until you came to the front.

           The house sat framed in the midst of a small clearing. It shone like sunlight on a day like today, pale blonde wood lacquered and shining under the mist. The yard blended into the woods with no fence to demarcate beginning or end. It went on, surely, as far as your eyes could see. If it stretched beyond that, it no longer mattered; you couldn’t touch it anyway.

           There was a small white canopy set up in front of the house underneath which sat a matching set of vanity and stool. You walked over to better appraise them.

           Everything melded seamlessly together. They were made of tapering, intricate parts, but seemed sturdy. They were neither very ornamental nor very plain. You pressed your fingers against it. The wood felt soft, as if the maker had preserved the life of a young tree within it. They were beautiful in a way that defied description.

           You noticed then that the garage of the house was open and that the man inside was responsible for the scraping sound. He wore a white shirt and jeans with worn sneakers on and was busy taking sandpaper to a flat piece of wood set on two sawhorses.

           You stood there in the rain watching him. There was a distance of only fifteen or twenty feet between you, but for all of that, he seemed to exist in another world.

           When finally he looked up, it seemed he too had to peer through a hazy curtain to see you. He blinked a few times and then set sandpaper down and straightened.

           “Do you make it a habit of trespassing on people’s property and spying on them?”

           Nothing in the way he said it was threatening. The lean of his body, the arch of his eyebrow, merely indicated a curiosity for why you were standing in the rain watching a complete stranger at work. You’d rather like to know the reason, too.

           “What is this? A garage sale? An antique shop?” you asked instead.

           He had gone back to sanding in the time between his question and yours.  

           “Well? Are you or aren’t you going to answer me? What is this place?”

           “This  _place,_ ” he said, an exasperated humor in his voice, “is where I live. And you’re still trespassing,” he added.

           “I wouldn’t be trespassing if you invited me to stand here.”

           He ignored you for a bit and continued to sand. You continued to watch him sand.

           After a minute, he exhaled a breath that lifted his brown bangs from his forehead. “Fine. You can stand there.” His hand came up and a finger shot out to waver around the place that you stood. “But don’t come any closer.”

           “Why not?”

           “’Cause you’re still a stranger.”

           “If I tell you my name, would I still be a stranger?”

           “Yes.”

           You hummed and that was the last noise exchanged between you except for the rasping of sandpaper against wood. He didn’t look up again from his work and in time, the rain began to fall with vigor, a curtain more real and opaque than whatever curtain you had imagined lay in the space between you.  You tucked your plastic bag into the front of your jacket and left the clearing in the woods.

* * *

 

            There was only one place to eat in town. The Diner was the only establishment that served made-to-order (and sometimes already-made) meals in the area. It was the local hotspot and on the weekends, everyone took their meals there, even the employees. It was a cheerful and loud affair, with everyone exchanging seats and stories. You felt particularly foreign at times like this, but you came every Sunday regardless. One day, you might find camaraderie instead of whispers reflected back to you.

           Your eyes cast about as you entered. Perhaps today you might hook a gaze that didn’t pretend you weren’t there. But there was no one who tried to make themselves familiar, and so you skirted around the center of the room, where all the tables and booths and people were, to the countertop that ran along the side of the room. The server there, a surly looking man, said just enough to communicate food, drink, and cost, and then left you alone. No pretty smile this time and that much you were thankful for.

           Your coffee and a plate of eggs and bacon arrived. You waited until the server retreated back to the rest of the room before adding two packets of sugar and a heavy dose of cream to your coffee. Your eggs were sunny side up instead of over easy and your bacon looked like coal with a dash of grease. You ate without an appetite and left without a tip. The only thing that had tasted good was the coffee.

* * *

 

           You found yourself back in the clearing in the woods the next time it rained. The trail of puddles led you right back to the pale-colored wooden house set among the trees. The white canopy was still up, although the furniture beneath it had changed. A desk with rounded edges made of two types of wood, one a bleached variety and the other a deep brown color. The swirl of the two types of wood was its only decoration, but it was as mesmerizing as staring into fire.

           The garage was open again today, although there was no rasp to greet you this time. Instead, the woodsman, as you now thought of him, had his back to you and was resting his hands on top of his head.

           “What are you doing?” you asked.

           You saw the way the olive green fabric of his shirt stretched as his shoulders stiffened and relaxed before he turned around. He wore dark wash pants with his long-sleeved shirt. In the darkness of a day overcast with clouds, he blended in with his background.

           “Trespassing again, huh?” It was said in that same easy manner as the time before. How long had it been? You sought to remember, but the number of days seemed to slip your grasp.

           You shrugged and changed the topic.

           “Is that for sale?”

           His eyes followed yours to the desk underneath the canopy. When he looked back at you, his eyes glowed.

            “You like it?”

           “It’s nice,” you admitted.

           Some satisfaction came onto his face, which you only noticed from its previous absence. “But I can’t sell it to you,” he told you, and you nodded. You had expected as much.

           “You’re not going to ask me why?”

           “Will it change the result?”

            “No… probably not.”

           “Then there’s not much point, is there.”

           He gave you a long, thoughtful look, then shook his head. “You’re distracting me.”

           You looked around the garage. It was made of the same wood as the house. The interior walls were plywood and the ceiling had exposed rafters. All the tools were put up neatly on racks on the wall. The burnished wood work table set underneath the window on the left hand side was organized. There was wood everywhere, but no new piece to work on. There was no wood set up. The floor was clean.

           “From what?”

           “From thinking about what I should do. I  _was_ going to do some staining today, but I can see that’s not going to happen.”

           “Why not?” You ignored the bristle of accusation in his voice.

           “Have you looked outside?” He didn’t look as he flung a despondent hand at you and the outside. “Anything I paint right now will take ages to dry.”

           “So what are you going to do?”

           “I don’t know.” The words gusted from his lips. His mood had darkened and became nebulous. “Maybe I’ll just…take a break today.” He said it with reluctance, but he stood there unmoving. Although he wasn’t facing you, you could tell that he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. You recognized that unsatisfied feeling in him—he was searching for something that he knew he couldn’t find. Not right now.

           You were eleven steps away when he said, “Where are you going?”

           “Back,” was all you answered.

* * *

 

           Many days of dryness followed. You would wake up with the dawn and lay in bed listening to all of the different bird calls. You had been here now for a few months and although you recognized the calls by sound, you couldn’t match one to any single bird. Some days, you laid in bed until you fell asleep again, all the while imagining what each bird might look like. But that was all it was in the end. Your imagination.

           Other days you spent wandering around, a thirst insatiable for a sight unseen. You liked the primitive quiet of the woods, the lingering whisper of a danger that you knew you would be wholly unprepared for. But so far you had come across squirrels and deer and other things that were more eager to flee than to fight.

           You thought you may have found the trail to the pale-colored house and the woodsman. There were deep indents like potholes in the ground in a giant’s ambling path. But you didn’t take it. It would feel too much like intruding on a day like today.  _Like trespassing,_  you thought, and a small smile came to your lips.

* * *

 

           There was an umbrella waiting for you at the edge of the garage when next you came to the small clearing. You hesitated to pick it up. You had never been that close to the boundary line between your worlds. But you caught the woodman’s eyes before they flitted back to his chiseling. He was baiting you, you realized, a trap for prey that was either too fast or too fierce, or perhaps both, for him to catch.

           You walked slowly and deliberately to the edge, keeping your eyes on him the entire time. When the umbrella was within reach, you grabbed it and paced yourself back to your customary spot.

           You opened it there. It was large, one of those golf umbrellas with white and green panels. You held it low over your head so the metal tines brushed the flyaways in your hair.

           “How come you only come here when it rains?”

            _Because this is the only place I’ve found where I can’t feel it._

The woodsman was moving around the piece he was working on. A picture frame this time. His eyes never lifted from it.

           “Only when it rains and no umbrella. No hood, either. What kind of use is a rain jacket without a hood?” He shook his head, you didn’t know if it was in disapproval of your habits or if it was to shake his bangs away.

           For the first time, you stood here dry, or almost so. Dry like him in the garage, something over both of your heads, an item clasped by both of your hands in your grip.

           You watched him for a little longer this time. The woodsman in his garage, sundry tools around him, a broom waiting to clear shavings and splinters away. But your eyes no longer took in the whole picture. Their focus had narrowed to the movements of his fingers and wrists and arms, how the muscles connected all the way down to the fingertips and the way they held their instruments. How with a single move, a swath of wood peeled away, graceful and devastating and calculated, to fall at his feet. How physical and fine the art of his movement.

           His art had hypnotized you both, but the pain and eventual numbness in your extremities from the cold ushered you back to the present. It was a spring day and you thought you wouldn’t need a sweater. It was probably the rain’s fault. Already it felt a number of degrees colder than earlier. You left without him noticing.  

* * *

 

           You began to notice more on your walks. Or perhaps notice wasn’t the right word. You had always noticed the details, but you were only beginning now to see the connections behind them. Nearly all of the buildings in town were made of wood or had some wooden component to them. It made them look unified and picturesque. A true community.

           But perhaps the wood wasn’t the real reason. Perhaps it was the maker behind it.

           Because now you could see the same stylistic choices repeated in one cabin and in another house. Carved window casings balanced the majesty of the aged timber used to build the structure. Large windows and a cascade of different sloped roofs. Rough sawn logs juxtaposed with wood sanded so smooth, it gleamed.

           This was all the work of your woodsman. You felt proud and in awe of him. You had never once seen him about town and you had begun to think he existed only in the clearing in the woods. But here, he was all around you and the sun burned a little brighter.

* * *

 

           The next day of rain saw you taking a white and green gold umbrella from where it had been standing in the corner by the door and walking out as soon as you had eaten and dressed. Your route no longer meandered, waiting to stumble upon another whose beginning you couldn’t recall, but whose ending you knew intimately. Your feet were assured of their direction and took you in a straight shot.  

           He was in the garage measuring out pieces of lumber when you arrived. You tried to imagine what he could be constructing, but the pieces were too much of a puzzle.

           He finished cutting the piece he had just measure out and then he stopped, turning to you.

           “You know, I meant that you could borrow that umbrella, not that you could abscond with it. It’s my only good umbrella, you know.”

           But when you made to close it, he pushed his hands out.

           “No, no. You don’t have to give it to me right now. It’s raining!” He laughed. “Although I guess that didn’t stop you before.” He looked at you with the glinting curve of a smile, then, humming, turned back to his task. Your hand still rested uncertainly on the runner of the umbrella.

           “What are you making?”

           “Hm?” He had put the pencil in his mouth while positioning the next piece of wood. He removed the pencil, made a quick notch, then tucked it behind his ear. “This? Nothing much. I’m just working on it in my spare time.”

           Was this his spare time, then? This time spent in the garage while it was raining, a stranger with hungry eyes past the threshold?

           Although you could see his fingers, the fine details were obscured by rain and distance. But you thought that you could complete the picture in your head. It wasn’t imagination exactly, but pulling on reality, stretching it just thin enough that you could peer through its translucence. You saw fingernails, cut short, no white; even then wood and oil and stain residue beneath them, always beneath them. A bad habit of picking at them, of trying to sink the teeth underneath them, but only when he wasn’t busy, only when he wasn’t using his hands.

           Because this was the time he spent all day thinking about. Through the film of reality, you could watch him at breakfast, building an image in his head while he fried eggs and chewed on his thumbnail, or doodling on the backs of important papers at the kitchen table only to erase them when he’s realized what he’s done, leaving ghosts of creativity for the accountant to puzzle over later. His ingenuity fettered until this single moment in his day that you now witnessed, unfiltered, standing outside his garage in the rain. No imagination required.

           “When are you free?”

           He looked up, startled, and had to go back to fix the marking where his pencil had just slipped.

           “What?”

           “I’d like to commission a piece from you.”

           “Oh.” He made the fixed line much thicker than before. “I don’t know. I have a lot of things I’m working on right now.”

           You looked at him beneath hooded eyes and didn’t press the issue further.

           “What were you thinking about commissioning though?” He didn’t look at you as he asked and his hands moved lethargically. He already was dreaming of something, you could see it.

           “Whatever you most desire to make. I’d like that best.”

* * *

 

           Unlike all of the previous times, today the rain hadn’t started until mid-afternoon. You dithered. It was too much like a sunny day and the rain was light. Would he still be there? The latest you had arrived at the woodsman’s clearing had been early afternoon.

           But you had grabbed all you items and gone straight there. The garage was open, but he wasn’t there. Everything was clean. Perhaps he had already had his spare time for the day. So you walked forward, emboldened by your solitude, and laid the parcel on the edge of your two territories, more on his side than yours.

           The door from the house to the garage opened at that moment. He emerged, dream-like, dreaming. His hair was a mess of directions. He wore sweatpants and a rumpled red thermal shirt, worn tennis shoes on his feet that he had slipped on, the backs crushed beneath his heels. They made odd clattering sounds as he tripped down the stairs, leaning on the bannister.

           “I heard it start raining outside. I thought you wouldn’t come because of the time.”

            _He thinks of me even when I’m out of his sight._

           “But it kept nagging at me, the idea that you might just be standing outside my garage all alone in the rain. So I came out here to prove myself wrong. Or at least, I think that’s what I thought… I don’t know. I’m not quite sure anymore.”

           His fingers left the bannister an afterthought, and he drifted over. You watched the distance between you disappear, twenty feet, ten, less, until he came to a stop in front of you.

           “But here you are.”

           You took a step back and that’s when he noticed the parcel.

           “What is this?”

           He looked at you as he said it, so you weren’t sure whether he meant the rain drops hitting his fringe, the parcel you had just dropped off on his garage step, or some other thing that you shied away from describing.

           “It’s yours.”

           He held your gaze a moment longer before his eyes dropped back to the ground, where the gift you left laid between you. He bent down and examined it. You took another step back.

           It was a long, skinny, rectangular box. He turned it around on all sides looking for some kind of clue, but there was none. He checked your gaze one more time before he began opening it.

           When he peered inside, he began laughing lowly, the corners of his eyes scrunched in delight.

           “Why orange?” he asked, his voice half laughter.

           You shrugged.

           He pulled the umbrella out of the box and hugged it to him.

           “Thank you,” he said.

           You nodded. You were glad that he hadn’t asked you why you hadn’t just given him back the green and white umbrella, why you hadn’t taken this one for your own.

           “I’ll make sure to use it. Next time.”

           “Next time?” you parroted.

           He nodded behind you. You turned and saw the same thing you saw every other time you came. The clearing, the white canopy and the blue tarp, a couple pieces of exquisite furniture on top.

           “You didn’t notice? It stopped raining.”

           You looked up at the roof of your umbrella. Through it, you could see the shapes of single raindrops as they slowly merged and found their way to the precipice between umbrella edge and ground. No new drops fell to join them. You could no longer hear the dull  _plunk_ of them against the fabric. You probably hadn’t heard it for a long time here. Maybe not since the first time you visited the clearing.

           Slowly, you lowered the umbrella, shook it off, and closed it.  

* * *

 

           “It’s about time.”

           He said it with his back to you and you wondered if, like you, he had developed an awareness of your distance. He was on his knees, fixing two pieces of wood together into an L. Splayed around him were precut pieces and tools and a blueprint, which he was busy wrapping up.

           “What’re you working on? Is this the same piece as last time?”

           When you said last time, you really meant the time before that.

           “Come see.” He beckoned you forth, a single gesture, then continued arranging this new composition of wood, either confident that you would follow or uncaring.

           But you couldn’t believe the latter of him and moved closer.

           When after a moment he turned around, he saw you had only progressed a step or two nearer.

           “What are you doing?” And it was the bewilderment in his voice, the first time you heard it, that decided you. You stepped over the threshold, carefully closing the umbrella outside and setting it in a corner, and wafted closer.

           The wood smell was strong. You wondered how you never noticed it before. Perhaps it was the rain. It seemed like such an obvious thing, but this was a precious new discovery for you and you savored it, inhaling deep breaths. So this was what it smelled like on the other side.

           Although the woodsman had called you in for a closer look, a closer look yielded you no answer. Perhaps it was obvious to a carpenter, but to you, it looked the same as it had from the outside. Like two pieces of wood affixed together.

           Without your prompting, he began to explain his every move, why he used one tool and not another, what type of wood was superior for a certain use, and how he sourced and prepped his lumber. Eventually his voice tapered off, wearied and hoarse, but you found yourself understanding at times his process even without him saying.

           “Well,” he said after hours of this, a crack of noise in a storm of silence, “isn’t it about time for you to go?”

           You wondered what device he used to tell the time. The light diffusing through the clouds was unreliable.

           He stood up, hands  on his knees like an old man pushing himself up, palms sliding up his jeans to leave a smear of wood dust.

           Uncertainly, you wandered over to the corner. You had never been sent off in this fashion before. Normally you left on your own terms. This was unfamiliar. Thinking it best to swiftly depart now that you had been asked, you grabbed your umbrella, pierced it into the rain, and marched.

           “Hold on!”

           Something tipped your umbrella to the side and you shimmied it over so you could see. The woodsman stood next to you, close enough so that his orange and white umbrella bumped against yours, a teasing grin on his face.

           “Where to?”

* * *

 

           “This one’s yours?”

           He said it in such a dumbfounded manner that you fished in your pocket to produce your key, holding it up for him to see.

           He nodded. “You know, I’ve always liked this cabin. Each piece of wood is unique.” You stared at him, and as if he could sense it, his eyes flickered sideways. “What do you think?”

           You tilted your head and tried to look at it from his perspective. You had never really given it much thought. It was only a temporary space to stay, a place that you returned to when you had nowhere else to go.

           But now that you were looking, you could see what he meant. It was different than all of the other cabins and houses in the area. It had none of the decorative filler that others had, nor the modern minimalist touch. It was clean and looked more like home to you than any other place in town had.  

           “I guess it’s nice after all.”

          You brought your key and yourself to the door. As you unlocked it, you could feel the woodsman at your back. You intentionally turned and shook your umbrella out before closing it, forcing him back a few paces.

           “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he asked as you prepared to close the door.

           You peered at him through the crack. “No.”

           His mouth opened and closed, a fish caught out of water. “Well, why not?”

           “Because I’m a stranger.”

           Laughter blistered out of him, paralyzing you, thrumming through you, making you laugh unexpectedly, too.

           He moved closer to the door. “Will you still be if you tell me your name?” he asked coyly.

           Now that you were on the inside looking out, your trepidation fell away. You boldly reached out, index finger extended, and touched it to the skin on the inside of the wrist holding the umbrella. You slid it along in shapes and scrawls. The skin was soft there and a part of you hungered to dig your nail in and leave a mark. But this would be enough, you told yourself. This would be enough. You lifted your finger and your hand returned to your side.

           “What was that?” His words came out breathless, quivering almost visibly in the air.

           “My name.”

* * *

 

           He wouldn’t let you stand outside anymore. If you tried to stand in your habitual spot, he would finish the single action he was making and bookmark it to look up at you. What are you doing, he would ask in that gentle voice. Come inside.

           And you would go again across the threshold into the woodsman’s domain, closing your umbrella and setting it in the corner next to his until one day his white and orange umbrella waited for yours in a carved stand. And so you, too, used that instead.

           At first, you stood a few lengths away from the woodsman, observing. From time to time, he would remember you and call you to him, stretching out his arm until you came close enough for him to touch. He would explain what he was doing, movements exaggerated and slow so that you could learn to read them. In time, he began instructing you on their use, slipping the pen into your fingers so that you could write this foreign language into permanence. A few times, the tool would skip in your hand, gouging a mark outside of the pattern, and you would look with embarrassment and shame and guilt into a face that showed only understanding. It’s okay, he would say, it makes it unique, and he would refuse to take the tool from you, refuse to let you punish yourself because you were learning, refuse to fix the mark of the novice.

           And each evening, for now you lingered past the sun, the two of you would take up your umbrellas, raining or not, and he would take you to your cabin. And he would stand there in front of the door, learning the way you wrote with your finger against his skin, biting his lip in concentration, until one day you saw that his eyes skipped forward in anticipation of the next letter. Your finger drifted down the curve of his wrist and his eyes couldn’t follow quickly enough, inertia in motion. Already his expression was becoming wistful, missing something that had not yet ended.

           Because you had more to give him than an ending.

           You let him in.

* * *

 

           It was another sunny Sunday morning. The Diner was full to the brim with townsfolk. You had finally progressed beyond the stage of reserved curiosity and outright distrust. Now, they simply ignored you.

           You sat alone at the countertop as was your custom, shaking your two packets of sugar into your coffee when a hand came over and grabbed your cup away. An involuntary “Hey!” pulled its way out of your throat and you swiveled on your bar stool to see the woodsman holding the cup just beyond your reach.

           “Why are you sitting by yourself? Come with me.” His hand extended and you took it. Together the two of you walked around the room and introduced each other to the patrons. You were dazzled by the sun, by this new perspective of the restaurant, and by his smile. How enlightening it was for your name to fall from his lips and his name from yours, as if you had all the letters of the name but only now knew how to arrange them. He spoke it with tenderness, as if he thought of you all the time, your name on his mind, whispering it aloud to taste how it sounded.

           By the time you had greeted everyone and the conversations, and the people, had petered out, you were exhausted and your coffee was cold. You sat at a booth, Jongin next to you. You both rested your heads on the table facing each other, your hands still entwined beneath it.

           “Hi,” he whispered.

           You giggled.

           “Hello,” you whispered back, mustering a serious voice. You squeezed his hand and he returned it, warm and rough. Whatever phantoms you had created in this place, they were gone now. How different a familiar place could look if you only turned it on its side.

* * *

 

           You heard odd scuffling and scraping noises and the sound of someone’s voice outside your door one day. You opened it to find not a person, but a wall of wood.

           “Jongin?” you called out.

           “Here!” A voice somewhere behind the wood said. “You might want to move back.”

           You stepped back a few paces and then the wall of wood shifted and turned and suddenly Jongin was holding it and propelling it through the door. You moved to help him but he grunted and told you he had it. You grabbed a corner anyways.

           He guided you through your own house and into your bedroom and together, the two of you maneuvered the wooden thing into one corner of the room. You stepped back and saw that he had made for you a wardrobe. The wood was a little lighter than the walls of your room, but it had dark inclusions in whorls from a burl. The lines were simple and each door was trimmed with small ivy etchings. It was gorgeous.

           “This is what I was working on in my spare time,” he said with bashful pride. “Your commission. I knew that this cabin didn’t have a closet, so I thought it might come in handy.”

           “It does. Very much. I love it, really, thank you. I didn’t even think about getting a wardrobe or a dresser. I just left my clothes wherever they fell.” You marveled at it, for it was not just a wardrobe, but a monument, of him, of you. Made of his hands and fashioned by thoughts of you.  A reflection of a reflection.  

           “You were lonely, weren’t you.” He twisted around, two fingers loosely gripping the knob of your new wardrobe. In his eyes, you saw that he wanted you to continue and he wanted you to stop.

           “In the middle of a lost little town, you hid yourself, in the trees and in your work.” You picked up one of the sweaters on your bed and began folding it and then you handed it to him. “I hope you kept warm all that time.”

           He gave you a small smile, head ducking in embarrassment, and you had to take a deep breath because your heart clenched at the sight. But when he moved to put the sweater in the wardrobe, you laid your hand on top of it.

           “That doesn’t go there.”

           “Where should I put it then?”

           “Wherever you want. Just not there,” you said. You picked listlessly through the pile of sweaters on your bed, the sweaters you bought whenever it was raining and cold and that odd ache you had had since you were a child returned.

           Then a peculiar thought struck you.

           “What’s your size?”

           He raised his brows, but told you.

           “Hold that up.” You nodded your head to the sweater he was holding, and he gave you puzzled look, but complied.

           “How does it look?” he asked, gaze switching between you and the sweater he held against his chest.  

           “It fits,” you whispered, and then you began laughing.

          It was the last sweater you had bought. You purchased it the day you met Jongin, right before your first meeting. But you suspected that a part of you had always known him.

           He laid the sweater on your bed and began rifling through the others, looking at the tags. “Why are all of these different sizes? Most don’t even look like they would fit you.”

           You stopped his hands. “They’re not for me. They’re for all the people you could’ve been.”

           He stared at you and you watched as your words sunk into comprehension. He took your hands and kissed them, then your lips, your forehead, the space right below your eyes. He kissed you, slow and longingly, as if in his lips laid the cure to all the lonely nights you had ever spent dreaming of a person like him. And they did. They did.

           Your arms guided him onto the bed by your side and the two of you swept the remaining sweaters onto the floor and together, you discovered a new side of this love.

* * *

 

           You woke up in the early morning with an urgent need to use the bathroom. Jongin’s face was pressed against the back of your neck. His exhalations warmed the skin cooled by his inhalations. His arm fell across your shoulders and over your chest. You slid out of his grasp and his arm fell onto the part of the mattress heated by your body. You pushed aside the sweaters on the ground with your foot and crept to the bathroom.

           When you came back, something in the corner of your room by the bed caught your eye. It had probably become visible after pushing all those clothes aside, a thin stream of light illuminating it. You knelt in front of it. It was a heart, crudely formed and unsymmetrical. Someone had carved it into the wood after it was polished and laid. Probably one of the previous renters. It was a good omen, you thought, finding this heart at dawn.  

           You stood up and stretched and then climbed back into bed, skimming your lips against Jongin’s skin in apology until he woke up and forgave you.

* * *

 

           Morning rolled into afternoon with your rising. Jongin had to leave in order to deliver a table to one of the people you had met at The Diner. You pottered around the cabin, putting things away. You had been overcome by a strange urge to do so. You wanted to show your appreciation for him in any conceivable way, although you admitted to yourself this was a silly way of showing it. And you needed something to distract yourself from his absence after the newness of last night.

           You had moved into the bedroom after cleaning the kitchen, picking up stray pieces of your clothing from the floor and folding them. What would you do with all of those other sweaters? The emotions you felt at the moment of sale shivered through you. You clutched Jongin’s sweater to you, bundled it in your arms. It would be the first thing to go in the wardrobe, you decided. A symbolic gesture.

           You opened the doors of the wardrobe, inhaling the smooth scent of worked wood. And then you slid the sweater to one corner of the shelf below the rack. Then you shifted it to the opposite side, because something caught your attention a moment late. You stuck your body into the wardrobe, and although the light was dim, it seemed to glow to you. Carefully, you leaned back and closed the doors softly, as if you might scare it away. All the while, your heart pounded in your ears.

* * *

 

           Later, the two of you lay in bed, whispering a mingling of meaningless and meaningful words to each other.

           “That day you came to me in the afternoon and it stopped raining, I felt like I had finally caught you,” he confessed into your hair. “You weren’t just some mirage the rain conjured up and brought to me. I thought you might melt the first time you closed that umbrella.

           “But here are you.” His hand squeezed almost painfully around your upper arm. “It’s like you existed in the moment I thought of you.”

           “Then when did I start existing?”

           “Always.”

           “I found something this morning,” you admitted.

           “What?” He was focused on your hand.

           “Your heart.”

           He snorted. He was running a finger back and forth along the dips and rises of your knuckles.

            “Two of them, actually, although I suspect there are more.”

           He stopped and tilted his head up to look at you.

           Your heart beat fast. “I’m right, aren’t I? You sign everything with a heart.”  

           Because it was a heart you found in the back left corner of the wardrobe. It was polished and even, the chiseling smooth. But there had been no question in your mind. This was the brother to the one in the corner of your bedroom.

           His voice was low and reverent when he spoke. “You’re the first person to realize that.”

           “You made this cabin, didn’t you. That’s how you knew the bedroom didn’t have a closet before I even let you in the bedroom.” You were realizing the words as you spoke them.

           He nodded.

           “It was the first major thing I built by myself. It’s one of my favorites.” His eyes roved around the room and you knew that every nail and joint recalled to him a memory. His eyes fastened back onto yours after a moment and he sat up.

           “You’re very lucky, you know.”

           “How’s that?”

           “I don’t just let this place to anyone.”

           “Who then?”

           “You.”

           “Who else?”

           A smile came to his lips and you knew the answer.

           “I’m the first.”

           “Would you like a prize for your discovery?” he joked.

           You pushed him back down on the bed.

           “What more could I ask for when I already have two hearts from a single man?” you asked, fingers running over the softness of his lips.

           He laid his hand over yours and kissed your fingertips before guiding your hand to a rest on his chest.

           “How about a third?”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote _(With Heart)_ just over two years ago. This remains my longest oneshot to date, and it is one of my favorite pieces. It felt like a dream to write, and I hope that quality translates to you as the reader.
> 
> Thank you for reading. 
> 
> Crossposted from tumblr. If you're interested, you can follow me there [@technicallymilkshakes](https://technicallymilkshakes.tumblr.com/)!


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